samscully

It does not exactly answer your question but this study [1] had some relevant results.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAND_Health_Insurance_Experime...

What if the robots are better at the new jobs as well?

For anyone interested in this sort of thing "Why Buildings Fall Down" [1] is a good related book. I did civil engineering at university and you'd be surprised how many beautiful and interesting buildings only ended up that way because of constraints forced on the engineers and architects by the surrounding environment.

[1] https://www.amazon.co.uk/Why-Buildings-Fall-Down-Structures/...

If the tax is 100% of the annualised return on the land (so perhaps around 6-7% of the land value) an increase in property values will lead to a concomitant increase in the level of UBI. Presumably there is an equilibrium point where prices settle down though it would lead to significant inflation initially.

Regularisation methods like dropout are often good enough that you can build a network with too many parameters (for the amount of data you have) and rely upon the regularisation to find the subset of that network that is actually useful. People have recently got good results from also randomly dropping weights, or even whole layers.

Uber could still offload maintenance, fuel, liability etc to other entities and license the self driving software to them. Those entities would still have much lower operating costs than human drivers. They could even open source the self driving software to commoditise their complements [1].

Personally I hope that regulators do a bait and switch on Uber by allowing them to build a temporary monopoly and then reintroducing competition by introducing the "right to be represented by a bot" [2].

[1] http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/StrategyLetterV.html [2] http://continuations.com/post/108912689660/big-and-bot-polic...

I think the concern is less that an AI apocalypse is imminent and more that if it does happen, we won't see it coming and it will happen so quickly we won't be able to do anything to stop it. So it's important to try to avoid it ahead of time.

The Great Gatsby curve [1] suggests that increasing inequality may lead to lower social mobility. The further apart the rungs are on the ladder, the harder it is to climb.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Gatsby_curve

Another factor is generational wealth. Most of my friends who own houses in London earn less than me but were given large amounts of money by their parents. When you have a 20-40% deposit the monthly mortgage payments become much more affordable.

I have seen people in my neighbourhood (Bermondsey in London, UK) struggling with luggage twice, luggage that was clearly far too much for them to carry on their own. Both times I offered to help them take it from the train station to wherever they were going. The first time the man accepted my help, the second time the woman politely declined.

Even the first time I detected an uneasiness, partly because we were strangers of course, but also I got the sense that the man was very wary of putting on me at all. Perhaps because people like not having obligations towards their neighbours it feels wrong to accept help and thus set up an expectation of reciprocisity. Maybe this then leads to not offering help because it is assumed it will be refused?

London is a particularly atomised place of course, back home I think I would have got a very different response.

I give to the top charities on GiveWell [1] instead. As an individual you can't help everyone, at least with GiveWell you can be fairly sure your money is making someone's life better.

[1] http://www.givewell.org/

> The most salient finding from this analysis is that women whose intimate premarital relationships are limited to their husbands—either premarital sex alone or premarital cohabitation—do not experience an increased risk of divorce. It is only women who have more than one intimate premarital relationship who have an elevated risk of marital disruption.

As far as I can see this suggests that believing in cohabitation is not a strong factor when it comes to divorce.

I suppose part of the difficulty is that no matter how good your process, you still need an 'objective function', and that will always be defined by ideology. I agree that having the measurement of results at least partially based on hard data would be better though. Using measures that are less crude than simply "Is GDP higher this year?" might help as well.

Unfortunately in politics you are unlikely to get any kind of consensus on what this 'objective function' ought to be. Perhaps this is partly why smaller more homogenous societies like the Nordic countries are often considered to be better governed [0], it is much easier for them to come to a consensus about what society's goals should be, and therefore it is easier to strive efficiently towards those goals.

[0] http://www.economist.com/news/special-report/21570835-nordic...

I applied for a large quant hedge fund out of university (Man Group AHL) with a masters in civil engineering and got to the final round. The other 5 candidates all had MFE degrees and seemed to struggle with the technical interviews a lot more than I did. It seemed like the fund was more interested in my understanding of statistics and general mathematical aptitude than specific knowledge of derivatives pricing etc, the same was true of my interviews at Jane Street.

They are called scrambles, there are a few in the UK but they are much more common in Japan. As you surmised they only really make sense when there are a large number of pedestrians and vehicular traffic has a low priority.

When I took traffic engineering at university we were taught that crossing layouts like this where pedestrians can move more freely are statistically much safer as drivers drive much more carefully. Another example is Exhibition Road, where the entire road is shared between pedestrians and cars.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exhibition_Road

> Often even if I say I did not understood, I'll get the same sentence repeated the same at speed of light.

I'm a native English speaker and I don't understand why people do this. If you are trying to have a conversation with someone, surely you want to do what is necessary for everyone to be understood as well as possible. It is only a little effort for you to slow down and simplify your speech, but it is impossible for the other person to learn better English on the spot. I lived in Hong Kong for a while and some US/UK people still wouldn't adapt their accent, even though the locals were humouring them by speaking English to them in the first place.

Perhaps it is easier for me to empathise given I have a (now very mild) Yorkshire accent, which was consistently mocked when I moved to London, and is reasonably slow paced anyway.

IANAL, but as far as I understand a company director only has a 'duty to promote the success of the company' in the UK [1]. I think it is similar in the US. 'Success of the company' doesn't strictly have to mean making a profit, if the shareholders don't want it to.

[1] http://www.taxresearch.org.uk/Blog/2013/01/07/companies-do-n...

If someone has changing the world as their primary goal, and they decide that a startup is the best path toward that goal, I don't really understand why they shouldn't do that? To me a startup is an amoral vehicle for achieving its founder's ends, so if they want to have changing the world as priority number one, and are satisfied with just breaking even, that is up to them (and similarly if turning a profit is top priority).

Of course if it doesn't at least break even eventually, a startup is not really a useful tool for achieving anything.

I apologise, my comment was far too cold towards people who have been presented with that very distressing choice, I should have thought more carefully about it before posting.

Abortion of a foetus with an identifiable disability is considered acceptable today by many people, which is similar in spirit if not in practice to eugenics.

I worked in a tunnel crew in the summer holidays during my degree. It was interesting to see the cultural similarities and differences when I moved into programming. It is probably one of the few industries (at least in the UK) where the majority of the power is in the hands of the workers and not the managers. They were paid significantly more than the managers and broadly speaking the job went ahead on their schedule. Unlike in programming a mistake could cost one of your coworkers their life, which seemed to have something to do with the strong camaraderie, but did also lead to a deep suspicion of unproven outsiders (like myself for the first few weeks I worked there). I prefer to be able to experiment with things and I was a bit too much of a delicate flower to be happy in that environment. I wonder how much the culture in different industries arises from people with certain personalities self selecting into or out of them, and how much is the actual nature of the work changing you.